Ryan O’HanlonNov 4, 2025, 04:41 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
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Ten games in, and it’s just as we all suspected. Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool were the clear top three heading into the Premier League season, and Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool are the current top three.
In other words, you could’ve taken a two-month nap the night before the Liverpool vs. Bournemouth season-opener and you wouldn’t have really missed anyth– OK, fine. Beyond the top three in the table, pretty much nothing has gone to plan.
Man City lost two of their first three matches. Liverpool won five in a row and then lost four in a row after they lost four matches — total — last season. Bournemouth, who lost 75% of their backline to big-money transfers to big-name clubs over the summer, have the same number of points as Liverpool, as do newly promotes Sunderland, who finished fourth in the Championship last season.
The points gap between Arsenal in first and City in second is the same size as the gap between City and Brentford, who are 12th. One spot lower, in 13th? Newcastle, who are currently ahead of Barcelona and Liverpool in the Champions League standings.
And after two straight years of all three promoted sides immediately getting relegated, instead it’s West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Wolves who comprise the bottom three. They’ve combined for three wins and four total manager firings; every other team in the league has at least three wins, and they all have the coach who was on the sideline when the season started.
Now, the 10-game mark is when we’re supposed to start to get a clear idea of what’s happening, when the random swings of the first few months of soccer start to coalesce into something real. At least, multiple studies have found that a team’s collective performance, as measured by a number of different team-strength metrics, starts to become predictive of that team’s future performance right around now.
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Rather than doing a much more complex and perhaps much more mathematically sound projection, this approach will be something simpler: (1) because it’s easier to understand, and (2) because that makes it easier to glean insights from what the projection tells us.
Knowing that, I then looked at the relationship between a team’s adjusted goal differential after 10 games and their points won over the final 28 matches. Based on data from the past 10 Premier League seasons, a team with a neutral adjusted goal differential after 10 matches would be expected to win 1.39 points per game for the rest of the season. And then every goal increase of adjusted goal differential increases the point per game expectation by 0.47 points.
Of course, 10-game performance can’t tell us everything; otherwise, we could just shut up shop right now and give these guys seven months off until the men’s World Cup.
Now, neither of these numbers can tell us everything, but I’m using them because there’s an intuitive logic to each one. Adjusted goal difference acknowledges the importance of creating better chances than your opponent as the main driver in team success, but it also accounts for the fact that sometimes teams play differently after a goal is scored and it also picks up some of the stuff for which xG models can’t fully account.
Finally, to figure out how to weigh each input, I looked at betting projections for season point totals. Given the financial incentives at play and the continued, insanely profitable existence of sports books, these are going to be the most accurate publicly available “projection systems.” I then chose whatever weight brought these projections closest to being in line with the markets: 64% transfer values and 36% adjusted goal differential.
• Projected points total: 79.3 • Projected rest of season total (rank): 54.3 (1st) • Market value (rank): €1.31B (1st) • Adjusted goal differential (rank): +1.28 (1st)
This one is simple: They’ve been the best team, they have the best roster, and they have a six-point lead on second place. Per ESPN Bet, their title odds are minus-230, or an implied percentage of around 70%.
If that point total seems low, it’s because the projections in a model like this are always going to be conservative. The teams toward the top and bottom of these projections will likely have more points than what you’re seeing here.
• Projected points total: 68.6 • Projected rest of season total: 52.6 (2nd) • Market value: €1.21B (2nd) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.83 (2nd)
This one, too, is simple: They’ve been the second-best team, they have the second-best roster, and they’re currently in second place.
When Erling Haaland scores, they’ve won six, lost one and drawn one. When Haaland doesn’t score, they’ve lost twice. That, also, is simple.
• Projected points total: 66.2 • Projected rest of season total: 48.2 (3rd) • Market value: €1.15B (3rd) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.46 (5th)
Could this be the first team that actually are better against better teams? At the very least, there has, so far, been a pretty clear correlation between the number of long balls their opponent attempts and how well Liverpool play.
In one of Liverpool’s better games of the season this past weekend, Aston Villa played just 12% of their passes long — the lowest proportion of any Premier League opponent. Will either of their next two opponents, Real Madrid and Manchester City, try to exploit this apparent weakness?
• Projected points total: 65.1 • Projected rest of season total: 48.1 (4th) • Market value: €1.14B (4th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.48 (4th)
Chelsea both manage to be underrated and overrated here. The former is because they’ve been given three red cards this season and thus played a large chunk of the campaign with fewer players than their opponent. And the latter is because they have such a large roster, and market value doesn’t normalize each team to a consistent number of players.
That said, it all cancels out in these projections, which leave them pretty much even with Liverpool in the race for third place.
• Projected points total: 59.6 • Projected rest of season total: 42.6 (5th) • Market value: €921M (5th) • Adjusted goal differential: -0.04 (12th)
• Projected points total: 58.0 • Projected rest of season total: 41.0 (7th) • Market value: €730M (7th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.19 (8th)
• Projected points total: 56.2 • Projected rest of season total: 38.2 (10th) • Market value: €448M (12th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.15 (9th)
• Projected points total: 55.4 • Projected rest of season total: 39.4 (8th) • Market value: €485M (11th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.59 (3rd)
We’re taking Bournemouth and Palace together because Bournemouth are higher in the table, but Palace are the better team. From a “Can somebody new crack the top five?” perspective, you would rather see the better team be the one with more points already in the bag. And Palace have a better adjusted goal differential than everyone other than Arsenal and City, but they’re two points and five spots behind Bournemouth in the table.
Maybe we get lucky and the points haul lets Bournemouth hang around while Palace’s performances start to match their results better. I’m not convinced that these teams aren’t better than United and Spurs.
• Projected points total: 53.8 • Projected rest of season total: 38.8 (9th) • Market value: €521M (10th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.34 (6th)
Is this really it? Brighton have an older team than Manchester City so far this season, but a turn toward a peak-age roster hasn’t produced an upturn in results or performance. Given what we’ve seen from them in past years with possession-oriented managers and ace data-driven recruiting, I really want this team to be fun and exciting and good. Over the past two seasons, it feels like that only happens once or twice a month.
• Projected points total: 53.6 • Projected rest of season total: 41.6 (6th) • Market value: €752M (6th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.25 (7th)
Coming into this weekend, Newcastle would’ve been my pick for “best team after the top four” from now until the end of the season — and they still might be. But, come on: this is West Ham, you guys! You’re in the Champions League! They’re old and bad!
Although 10th feels really low, the gap between Newcastle’s projection and Tottenham’s projection is smaller than the gap between Tottenham’s and Chelsea.
• Projected points total: 52.7 • Projected rest of season total: 34.7 (15th) • Market value: €340M (18th) • Adjusted goal differential: +0.01 (11th)
With matches against Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City among their next five, Sunderland probably aren’t going to hang around the top four much longer. But Sunderland are still hanging around the top four! You don’t need me to read you off the underlying numbers and tell you this is unsustainable, but the fact that Sunderland have played well enough to even be in the realm of some good fortune propping them up into the top four was close-to-unthinkable before the season started.
It might seem disappointing that they’re only projected to win the 15th-most points from here on out, but that number not being 19th- or 20th-most is a massive victory for a club that was favored to go right back down after getting promoted.
• Projected points total: 50.5 • Projected rest of season total: 35.5 (12th) • Market value: €546M (9th) • Adjusted goal differential: -0.42 (16th)
Villa are on the verge of becoming the Manchester United of the midtable: an expensive and theoretically talented squad with awful performances masked ever so slightly by not-quite-as-awful results. This is the second-oldest team in the league, too.